Expression Of Agency Research Articles

Gang-banging as edgework

The practices of gang members, often depicted as responses to degrading local and structural conditions, have not been sufficiently appreciated as expressions of agency. The concept of edgework, which explains the modern compulsion to manage dangerous circumstances through finely honed skills, provides a means to recognize both the alienating circumstances out of which gang-banging arises, as well as the agency involved in the thrills members pursue. This article examines the alienation experienced by gang members in school and on the streets, which gives rise to the compulsion, for some, to skillfully manage the risks involved in molding a hard, masculine identity.

‘They are like crocodiles under water’: rumour in a slum upgrading project in Nairobi, Kenya

This article intends to build a bridge between the anthropological study of rumour and development studies. By analyzing the case study of an upgrading project in Mahali, an (anonymized) informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, the importance of rumour for development in practice is revealed. That importance is two-fold: first of all, it is a tool to fulfil personal interests in the interfactional negotiation over project resources, e.g. land, and the related power struggles. Second, it is a tool of sense-making and expression of agency in the uncertain context of a development project. Current literature notably describes development as a process of assemblage rife with gaps and with a tendency to exclude (local/supralocal) political–economic processes from its plans. In such a context, limited access to reliable information pushes people towards the alternative source of information that is rumour. The article looks into the factors contributing to rumour, specifically residents' experience of past events, interfactional conflicts over power and contextual uncertainty. It also discusses the combined effects of rumour on the slum upgrading intervention. Rumour has a definite effect on power struggles between factions as well as the livelihoods of other, less powerful, residents (for instance through displacement). It decreases the trust residents have in a development project as well as their willingness to invest time and effort in that project. Instead, it instigates conflict and occasionally even violence. However, rumour may also be considered a form of agency of weaker groups faced with a development intervention they do not agree with.

Curious Savages: Cultural Transvestism, Identity, and New France in Alain-René Lesage’s Les Avantures de monsieur Robert Chevalier, dit de Beauchene

Voici un sauvage que je vous amene. Sans aller au Canada, vous allez voir un mais un Iroquois qui ne vous fera pas peur [...] et ce ne fut pas sans etonnement qu'elles virent un gros gargon d'assez bonne mine, blanc et blond comme le sont communement les Canadiens. --Alain-Rene Lesage, Les Avantures de Monsieur Robert Chevalier, dit de Beauchene The 1727 edition of Furetiere's Dictionnaire universel defines curieux as and as something possessing bien des choses singulieres [...] que peu de gens scavent (Curieux n.page). Robert Chevalier, main character described in epigraph above from Alain-Rene Lesage's 1732 novel Les Avantures de Monsieur Robert Chevalier, dit de Beauchene, capitaine de flibustiers dans la Nouvelle-France, is indeed curieux, as he is exceedingly rare white and blond Iroquois. Or is he Canadian? Clearly narrator of this passage--Monsieur Remoussin, a French colonist whom Chevalier meets in Saint-Domingue--is playing with an identitary ambiguity predicated on clash of Chevalier's physical appearance and his vestimentary choices. Dressed as an but normatively handsome in European standards, Chevalier is an object of wonder to be gazed on. As a Canadien, he is already for French eighteenth-century metropolitan reader. As an Iroquois, he is doubly so. But Chevalier is only one of several curious characters who dresses against his prescribed social and ethnic station in Lesage's work. By analyzing these instances of cultural cross-dressing in Beauchene, I argue that this understudied work sheds new light on intersection of dress, colonial imaginaires, and identity in New France. My analysis of Beauchene builds on scholarship that links sartorial choices and identity, seeing in dress an expression of agency, or self-fashioning (Greenblatt 2). Cultural cross-dressing of type Chevalier is practicing has garnered particular scholarly attention recently. Sophie White's Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians, for example, directs our attention to how the process of cultural cross-dressing was foundational to initially fluid ethnic, class, and racial elaborations in New France (4). White's work complements studies by researchers of New France, working in historical modes, who have examined metissage and cultural transfers on ground in French New World. (1) However, far less attention has been paid to texts about New France, written for cosmopolitan consumption, that depict it as a place where identities could be constructed, transgressed, disputed, and negotiated. The sartorial transgressions--what I call cultural transvestism--puts into question immutability and naturalness of categories in New World. As such, Beaucbene depicts New France as a privileged space for problematizing and questioning of ancien regime's traditional hierarchies--either gender or ethnically based. French Sauvages By time Beaucbene appeared on Parisian book market in 1732, Lesage had achieved success in France with his play Turcaret (1709) and first nine tomes of his picaresque novel L'Histoire de Gil Bias de Santillane (1715-35). Contemporary scholarship has tended to overlook Beaucbene in favor of these better-known works. This is unfortunate because Beauchene's setting in French Atlantic and its depictions of interactions between settlers and Native Americans mark it as a rich and comparatively untapped resource in study of French imaginaires, or representations, of New World. Of course, Beauchene's emphasis on alterity is not radical per se, sharing a kindred spirit with other orientalist fiction of period. Like Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721) and Madame de Graffigny's later Lettres d'une Peruvienne (1747), Lesage's Beaucbene makes use of exotic gaze of other to observe France. Unlike these canonical texts, however, cultural transvestism of Beaucbene creates otherized--read savage--Frenchmen who become critiques of French society. …

Lingua, memoria e identità nei racconti dei migranti ispanoamericani

In a wide-ranging theoretical framework, principally based upon discourse analysis and the studies on language and identity, this article explores the construction of identity in a corpus of oral narratives collected among the Spanish speaking communities in Milan, by means of sociolinguistic and biographic interviews, seen as a complex event in which both parties act as active participant-observers. The study focuses on the features of these life stories, taking into account the ways in which the immigrants compare the two worlds an collocates themselves between the two cultures, the function of code-switching, the linguistic expression of �agency� (Giddens 1979) and the use of deictics.

Problematic Conjugations: Women’s Agency, Marriage and Domestic Violence in Indonesia

: This paper examines women’s experience of domestic violence within marriage in Makassar, South Sulawesi. It analyses the meaning of marriage for men and women, the roles of men and women within marriage, shifts in marriage practices – particularly the shift from arranged to “love” marriage – and unequal gender positions within marriage. We discuss some salient issues in the “margins of marriage” in Indonesia: polygyny and constructions of masculinity that condone the practice of polygyny/affairs, and attitudes towards divorce, particularly for women. We then examine women’s perception of the causes and triggers of domestic violence as revealed by fieldwork data, using the lens of women’s agency. Our findings are that women perceive that their expressions of agency – for instance in challenging men’s authority, moral righteousness and adequacy as breadwinners – are the most common triggers for male violence within marriage. Finally, we discuss the difficulty for women of escaping domestic violence, thereby getting some purchase on the relative capacity of women to resist, deflect or deal with the violence.

COMMITMENT AS MOTIVATION: AMARTYA SEN’S THEORY OF AGENCY AND THE EXPLANATION OF BEHAVIOUR

This paper presents Sen's theory of agency, focusing on the role of commitment in this theory as both problematic and potentially illuminating. His account of some commitments as goal-displacing gives rise to a dilemma given the standard philosophical theory of agency.Eithercommitment-motivated actions are externally motivated, in which case they are not expressions of agency,orsuch actions are internally motivated, in which case the commitment is not goal-displacing. I resolve this dilemma and accommodate his view of commitment as motivation by developing a broader descriptive theory of agency, which recognizes both agent goal-directed and goal-displacing commitments. I propose a type of goal-displacing commitment, which I call ‘tacit commitment’, that can be seen to fit between the horns. Tacit commitments regulate behaviour without being made conscious and explicit. This resolution suggests a means of bridging the normative/descriptive gap in social-scientific explanation.

Japan’s Role in Africa: Principle, Pragmatism and Partnership

Introduction Japan has been an important actor in Africa‟s international relations over the past few decades, although its role tends to be understated in most analyses of Africa‟s ties with the large powers. The Asian country‟s economic and aid relationship with the African continent has been highly variable, shaped by changing foreign policy objectives and internal political conditions in Japan, and changing reorientations and expressions of agency in African diplomacy. In recent years the emergence of new players from Asia in Africa‟s economy and politics (most notably the People‟s Republic of China) has nearly overshadowed the role that Japan has played on the continent; this eclipse of Japan reinforced by the country‟s relative decline as a major aid power. Yet Japan is still an important partner for the continent, being the source of a not insignificant volume of development assistance, and for some African countries, of investments in key sectors. Indeed, Japan contributes nearly one-third of all aid flows to Africa from the OECD‟s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), and as a member of the G8, has been instrumental in sustaining the forum‟s „Africa Agenda‟ over the years. It was on the initiative of the government of Japan, as host of the Okinawa Summit in 2000, for instance, that African leaders were first invited to be present at G8 proceedings, an early progenitor of the G8‟s later Heiligendamm outreach programme. Following and sometimes setting the example for Western G8 members, Japanese leaders also tended to use the G8 setting for pronouncements about Africa‟s plight and for pledges of aid doubling.

Moving beyond “mitigation and adaptation”: examining climate change responses in New Zealand

Despite the apparent failure of international negotiations and renewed criticism of the accuracy of climate science, responses to climate change continue in households, cities, fields, and meeting rooms. Notions of “doing something about”, or “taking action on” or “mitigating and adapting” to climate change inform practices of carbon trading, restoring native forests, constructing wind turbines, insulating houses, using energy efficient light bulbs, and lobbying politicians for more or less of these actions. These expressions of agency in relation to climate change provide the focus of our enquiry. We found that relationships or social networks linked through local government are building capabilities to respond to climate change. However, the framework of “mitigation–adaptation” will need to be supplemented by a more diverse suite of mental models for making sense of climate change. Use of appropriate languages, cultural reference points, and metaphors embedded in diverse histories of climates and change will assist actors in their networked climate change responses.

The Vocal Ecology of Crumb's Crickets

AbstractMaking sound is characteristic of agency in the natural world. It is curious therefore that having separated pitched sound from nature as much as possible—disciplined it into scales, temperaments, etc.—Western music has for centuries made extraordinary efforts to imitate natural sounds and processes with this un-natured sound. Whereas music often depicts nature, “music” has become abstract and transparent, and musical sounds themselves have become little more than acoustic tokens of objects related by structure. Any metaphorical connections with extra-musical sounds are suppressed in discourse about music because they constitute “effects.” In this article, I interpret the first movement of George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children (1970) as an expression of agency in the soundscape, considering vocal sounds, especially those attributed to crickets, as acts in a vocal ecology rather than imitation of natural sounds for programmatic purposes. My analysis invites us to hear this music—and music in general—as acoustic expression in a soundscape and therefore in ecological terms.

The Workplace Experiences of Waitresses: Exploring the Nature of Emotional Labour

In western developed economies, it is service work that is increasing most swiftly; thus as westerners, we are now more likely to experience this sector as either workers or clients (McDowell, 2009). This paper explores the working experiences of three young female waitresses in order to better understand the nature of the service sector in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand society. This exploration incorporates a literature review covering the nature of interactive service sector work, as well as findings from in-depth interviews. The interviews focussed on the management-worker-customer triadic relationship that characterises interactive service work. The interviews were also used to explore how exploitation and alienation can be experienced in service sector workplaces. Each of the three women described times when they felt the power of others (employer, co-workers and/or customers) imposed upon them through poor management practices, workplace bullying and conflicts, and negative customer interactions. The findings demonstrate that their relationships with co-workers and managers were far more important than those with various customers, with the former being reported as the source of higher levels of workplace strain and distress. This challenges the literature’s emphasis on both the customer and the employer negatively affecting workers when they are engaged in emotional labour. The interviews also indicated some support for Bolton and Boyd’s critique of Hochschild’s arguments on emotional labour, in relation to the young women’s expression of agency. This is because the women expressed that there were times during their work in which they were able to make decisions independently. This is demonstrated by the moments of autonomy the women indicated they experienced when they were at work, as well as their descriptions of how they were able to exercise agency in relation to the flexible nature of their jobs. Most significantly, however, it was the young women’s description of how they managed their emotional labour by holding their service sector identity as a temporary part of their life that indicated their internal agency and ability to resist the more negative aspects of their jobs. The women also indicated that the‘enjoyable aspects of work’, including the benefits of gaining industry based skills and qualifications, and finding personal enjoyment in positive interactions with customers, also helped mitigate the more negative aspects of their work life.

The Potential Impact of the Teacher on Student Identities in the Classroom in an English Language Teaching Context

This article explores the impact of the teacher on student identities within the English language classroom. Based on an empirical study, the article posits that the teacher can play a significant role in the negotiation, co‐construction, and legitimisation of student identities in the language class in a number of ways: by focusing on students as intellectual and cultural resources, by giving primacy to students' “transportable” (as opposed to “discourse” or “situated”) identities, by giving students the communicative “tools” (i.e., linguistic, pragmatic, and intercultural competences) in order for them to assert identities as an expression of agency, and by facilitating student participation both inside and outside the language class. It is held that the increased motivation, or “investment” in learning gained through the assertion and legitimisation of identities in the language class can have a positive impact on language learning. Similarly, a recognition of students' need to exercise personal agency in their learning as an expression of their perceived identity can have an impact on motivation.

Homelessness as a Choice

It has long been assumed that homelessness is a personal choice. As a choice, homelessness is embedded within debates about deviant behaviours and problematic pathologies. The “homeless person” is either making calculated and immoral choices to be homeless, or they are perceived to be powerless agents who lack the capacity to exercise choices. Rarely has it been adequately explained, however, what choosing homelessness means and how people who are homeless make sense of their choices. The structural and individual circumstances that situate and make choices meaningful require robust consideration. Drawing on ethnographic research with people sleeping rough, this article unpacks and illuminates some of the hidden complexities that underpin choices to be homeless. With an objective of retaining people’s sense for autonomy, the article contributes to the field by arguing that choice can be understood as an expression of agency and a commitment to a “normal” identity.

Researching transfronterizo literacies in Texas border colonias

This study examines literacies practiced in bilingual households located in emerging communities along the Texas–Mexico border known as border colonias. Drawing on theoretical notions of space as geographic and temporal, the simultaneity of global and local forces at work in colonias, and expressions of agency that are ‘in between’ accommodation and resistance, we focus on the forms and practices of literacy that bilingual families are engaging in to satisfy financial and religious needs in Spanish and English. Through interviews and home visits with parents in two colonias, this qualitative study found diverse and interesting uses of written Spanish that can support children's biliteracy development even as the use of written Spanish is discouraged in schools and parents are ambivalent about the use of Spanish literacy for academic purposes. We identify four themes – what children learn through Spanish; child language socialization; biliteracy and human capital; and demographic and economic change – and identify possibilities for learning and research among this understudied population.

Hunger as Health: Culture-Centered Interrogations of Alternative Rationalities of Health

What are the experiences of health at the margins of the globe? How do the material inequities in the distributions of resources across the globe play out in the expressions of the experiences of health in the localized contexts of the global margins? In this synthesis essay, I draw upon three interconnected ethnographies conducted over several villages in West Bengal, India, over a decade-long period to explore the alternative rationalities of health that emerge at the margins. At the heart of these ethnographies is the commitment to culturally center narratives of health as hunger, foregrounding the everyday experiences of hunger and the expressions of agency at the margins in securing access to food resources. Based on the synthesis of the ethnographies, entry points are suggested for the praxis of social change communication that builds on the articulation of health as hunger and imagines localized strategies of collective resistance.

Commonsense psychology, dual visual streams, and the individuation of action

Psychologists and philosophers are often tempted to make general claims about the importance of certain experimental results for our commonsense notions of intentional agency, moral responsibility, and free will. It is a strong intuition that if the agent does not intentionally control her own behavior, her behavior will not be an expression of agency, she will not be morally responsible for its consequences, and she will not be acting as a free agent. It therefore seems natural that the interest centers on the notion of intentional control. If it can be experimentally shown that agents do as a matter of fact not control their own actions, even though they think they do, it will have far reaching consequences for our moral psychology. In this paper I look at recent eliminative arguments allegedly demonstrating that our commonsense notion of intentional control is incompatible with experimental data in support of the dual visual stream theory.

Doing the programme or doing me? The pains of youth imprisonment

This article draws on research about young people's responses to being governed in secure residential facilities. It focuses on young people's expressions of agency as they ‘do programme’ in these facilities. It points to the ways that young people's language of choice and responsibility reflects their performances of ‘programme’ as they manage complicated emotions about change and growth. It is argued that there are various ‘splits’ that exist between official notions of programme compliance and those embodied and understood by young people. The article illuminates some of the more invisible pains experienced by young people in custody by revealing the intractability of the discourses of self-control in these young people's lives.

Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (review)

Reviewed by: Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again Katherine E. Mack Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again. By Bradford Vivian . University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010; pp x + 212. $60.00 cloth. Bradford Vivian's Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again challenges both the hallowed position that memory enjoys in popular culture and the interdisciplinary field of memory studies alike. Dominant cultural representations figure memory as a bulwark against time and mortality, yet portray forgetting as memory's antithesis, and consequently, as that which must be resisted. In this framework, memory constitutes a "public imperative" and forgetting the "tragic failure to heed it" (15). Vivian acknowledges that recent scholarship accounts for memory's inevitable [End Page 591] fragmentation, transience, and mediation, processes akin to forgetting, but he insists that it still exhibits a pervasive skepticism and wariness toward forgetting as such. Public Forgetting seeks to complicate scholars' understanding of forgetting and memory by revealing their "productive (rather than destructive) interplay" and by presenting forgetting as memory's "worthy alternative" (7-8). At its best, Vivian argues, public forgetting can stimulate deliberation and judgment, reconstitute existing sociopolitical relations, and "transform a public's perceived subservience to its past into an expression of agency over the future" (59). Public Forgetting offers readers a new conceptual approach, analytical vocabulary, and evaluative framework with which to recast forgetting in this more favorable light. Part I of Public Forgetting traces the historical origins of the equation of forgetting with oblivion to set the stage for Vivian's reconsideration of public forgetting. Vivian reviews the dominant tropes and figures in the Western tradition that depict forgetting as the enemy of remembrance and as synonymous with absence, erosion, loss, and death. He describes the thinner tradition of ars oblivionis, which highlights the advantages of "forgetting as oblivion" rather than questioning the logic of the equation itself (40). For example, one forgets to promote forgiveness, as in the cliché "forgive and forget," or to remember better or differently. Vivian draws on cognitive psychologists' notion of "adaption," Foucault's "counter-memory," Neitzche's "critical history," and Arendt's "natality" to generate an alternative heuristic for identifying and evaluating public forgetting. This heuristic focuses on public forgetting's fostering or repression of res publica, defined as pluralist speech and action and the contexts wherein such activities thrive (59). In the conclusion, Vivian elaborates on this heuristic by proposing three additional criteria with which to evaluate public forgetting: the degree to which forgetting results from violent suppression or deliberation; the kairos of forgetting as it relates to the existence of an archive (or lack thereof) of the event in question; and the public's proximity or distance from that which is being forgotten. In Part II, Vivian analyzes four instances of public forgetting and evaluates them according to his heuristic. The speeches given on the first-year anniversary of September 11 exemplify pernicious forgetting in regard to res publica, as they urged audiences to participate in traditional commemorative rituals, but to forget the obligations of democratic praxis that such rituals typically extol. The three subsequent case studies provide increasingly positive examples of public forgetting, demonstrating respectively how public forgetting "may contribute positively to the content of formal public history, the evolution of [End Page 592] informal cultural heritage, and transformative political leadership in periods of national crisis" (169). To produce a novel historical episteme about the inevitability of scientific progress and the superiority of scientific thought, the 19th century historian John Draper enacted public forgetting of the historically compatible relationship between religion and science. Though Draper's history enacted this forgetting without resorting to totalitarian historical revisionism, it did not foster "the prospects for informed critical judgment," thus placing his rhetoric of forgetting on "ambiguous middle ground" (110). For Vivian, the Gypsies' "ethic of communal nonrecollection," as elaborated and promulgated in their folklore, constitutes a double-edged sword (115). On the one hand, their forgetting of injustices suffered enables them to adapt to new contexts and circumstances; on the other, this continual forgetting "fails to assist in forging new, more durable social and political customs" (132). Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg...

Identities, Discipline and Routines

This paper analyses how people’s subjectively construed identities are disciplined by, and appropriated from, their talk about organizational routines. Identity work, we argue, is not just an expression of agency but also of power. Based on a study of a UK regional law firm, our research counter-balances understandings of professional lawyers as autonomous knowledge-workers, and emphasizes instead the extent of their subjection to disciplinary processes. It shows that power is intrinsic to discursive constructions of routine processes of organizing. We examine lawyers’ accounts of their time-keeping and billing routine, and how these both fabricated their identities, and how individuals said that they confronted, shifted and perverted organizationally sanctioned systems of meaning. The research contribution of this paper is to examine empirically and to theorize how discourse about routines both disciplines and is a resource for identity work.

A Moment's Daydreaming

A Moment's Daydreaming

Sociology and Beyond: Agency, Victimisation and the Ethics of Writing

AbstractDuring the last decades, development discourse has taken a neo-liberal turn. Parallel to this, the discourse of social science has become more oriented to matters of individual agency. Within the sociological and anthropological literature on development, this emphasis on individual agency is often expressed in terms of an explicit statement taken by the author that s/he wishes to correct an earlier (ethically inferior) emphasis on structure that is assumed to imply that the concerned people are passive victims. Problematising this ethics of scientific writing, this paper will look at various discourses in which the concept of victimhood is used, seeing claims and disclaimers of victimhood as themselves being expressions of agency in a contestation over accountability, responsibility, recognition and possible indemnification or blame.